The Mormons Sit Out the Civil War

On May 1, 1862, Capt. Lot Smith led a cavalry company of a little more than 100 volunteers from Salt Lake City east into the mountains. Their mission was simple: to help the Union Army guard the overland mail route and telegraph line in northern Utah and what is now southwestern Wyoming against Indian attacks.

Smith’s men, members of Utah’s Nauvoo Legion militia, never engaged any Indians in combat, though they helped facilitate the resumption of the mail in June. Still, the mission was an important one — it marked Utah’s only significant military contribution to the Civil War, and a brief respite in the Mormons’ often-tense relationship with Washington.

Library of CongressBrigham Young, ca. 1865

Five years earlier, Smith had led a territorial militia company of mounted men into those same mountains, but on a much more dangerous mission. In response to several reports that Mormons had mistreated federal appointees, in the spring of 1857 President James Buchanan had decided to assert Washington’s authority by replacing Brigham Young, Utah’s territorial governor and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with his own, non-Mormon appointee. To ensure that the replacement and his staff made it to Salt Lake City safely, Buchanan dispatched a full fifth of the Union Army as an armed escort.

Smith’s cavalry was at the forefront of Mormon efforts to prevent the Union force, led by Col. Albert Sidney Johnston, from reaching its destination. In early October, within a span of 24 hours, Smith and around 45 mounted militiamen captured and burned 76 Army supply wagons containing $1 million worth of food and clothing. Partly because of Smith’s efforts, the Utah Expedition wintered in the mountains, marching through Salt Lake City the following June — after Young decided to end his resistance.

Partly as retribution for the Utah Expedition, Young decided that the Mormons would sit out the Civil War. He saw the conflict as God’s punishment of the United States for its past mistreatment of his church, especially its failure to protect Joseph Smith, the Mormons’ founder who was murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844. In Young’s view, the war was a prelude to the “winding-up scene,” the end times in which American society would collapse under the weight of divine judgment and Mormons would save the Constitution, welcome the return of Jesus Christ and participate in his millennial reign.

Young was careful to tread the line between dissent and treason; in October 1861 he declared that Utah was “firm for the Constitution.” The church president parsed his language carefully: He was for the United States, not its current government. Privately, he said he “earnestly prayed for the success of both North & South.” A long war against the Confederacy, Young hoped, would distract the Union government from meddling in Utah affairs and finally leave the Mormons to govern themselves. In September 1861, Young stated that he “would be glad to hear that General Beauregard had taken the President & Cabinet and confined them in the South.” He cautioned, however, that he did not want “Utah mixed up with the secession movement.” Neither pro-Union nor pro-Confederacy, Young and his church were simply pro-Mormon.

While a few Latter-day Saints outside of Utah’s borders enlisted and fought on both sides, Young did not want his people marching off to defend a government he loathed. Young offered “to furnish a home guard for the protection of the telegraph and mail lines and overland travel within our boundaries,” but he was opposed to Mormons providing either money or manpower for the war. “I will see them in Hell before I will raise an army for them,” he declared in late 1861. With the exception of Lot Smith’s company, Utah raised no volunteers for the Union Army, and the territory’s Mormon population eschewed displays of wartime patriotism.

Meanwhile, after the Civil War began, the federal troops that had garrisoned Utah since 1858 left. Thus, when the Union Army wanted help protecting the mail and telegraph routes, it had little choice but to ask its former enemy. On April 28, 1862, Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, by the “express direction of the President of the United States,” sent a telegram to Young making the rare request for help from the Army to a private citizen and the head of a church. If the army wanted Mormons in Utah to volunteer their services, Brigham Young was the only man who could make it happen.

Young was only too happy to oblige, relishing the fact that the Army needed his assistance. Although Lot Smith’s company was to go beyond the boundaries of Utah into what is now Wyoming, Young was comfortable stretching his definition of a “home guard” — after all, the Mormon cavalry didn’t even have to serve under “Gentile” (i.e., non-Mormon) officers.

Within a few months, however, it was clear that the Civil War would not produce a Mormon reconciliation with the federal government. In August 1862, the Army asked Young to permit the re-enlistment of Lot Smith’s men, evidently for further service outside the territory. Young tersely refused, and Utah’s only military contribution to the Civil War came to an abrupt end.

Young had good reason to refuse: By the time of the Army’s re-enlistment request, Congress had rejected another of Utah’s regular and futile appeals for statehood. Congress had also carved an enormous chunk of territory out of western Utah to form the new Nevada Territory. It was also clear that despite wartime setbacks, Washington was not entirely neglecting its involvement in Utah affairs. Earlier that summer, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, enabling the federal prosecution of Mormon polygamists.

More immediately, Young refused to countenance the continued service of Lot Smith’s men because he had learned that the Army had dispatched a brigade of California volunteers to garrison Utah for the remainder of the war. Col. Patrick Edward Connor, the unit’s commander, made no secret of his anti-Mormon animosity. Even before reaching his new post, Connor accused its Mormon population of disloyalty and warned that those who uttered “treasonable sentiments in this district … must seek a more genial soil, or receive the punishment they so richly merit.” He bivouacked his men on a plateau overlooking Salt Lake City from the east, only three miles from Young’s principal residence.

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Disappointed at not joining the fighting in the East, Connor gladly would have brought about a military resolution to the “Mormon question.” Instead, restrained by the cooler heads of his superiors, he had to content himself with several noteworthy acts of brutality against Indians in northern Utah and on the Western Plains, campaigns that brought him two promotions to major general.

Young, meanwhile, seethed at the presence of Connor’s troops. “If General Connor crosses my path,” he warned in January 1865, “I will kill him.” Despite their heated rhetoric, Young and Connor avoided sparking a military confrontation.

Library of CongressGen. Patrick E. Connor

Shifting gears with the Union’s imminent victory, they organized a large celebration of Lincoln’s second inauguration in March 1865. Though neither Young nor Connor made an appearance, a troop of Union soldiers and a group of Nauvoo Legion militiamen paraded through the streets of Salt Lake City. A month later, following Lincoln’s assassination, Young lowered the flags over his mansion to half staff and had his gates draped in crepe.

The expressions of patriotism were too late to improve Utah’s standing in the eyes of Washington. By 1865, the Republican Party had abolished one “twin relic of barbarism,” and many within the party now contemplated the eradication of Mormon polygamy. Before the Civil War, westward expansion had produced bitter sectional divisions over slavery, divisions which impeded the assertion of federal power over those territories. Now, Washington was freer to devote its attention to the conquest, settlement and economic exploitation and integration of the West. It would be only a matter of time before the federal government took more decisive action against both polygamy and the church’s political and economic control of Utah.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.